HISTORICAL AMNESIA

Several recent books have developed theoretical arguments about
how historical memory is cultivated. The most important of these
in English are Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory
(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993) and David Lowenthal,
The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985). Two other books of significance are Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1983) and Eric Hobsbawm
and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983). Perhaps no study of historical
memory can rival that of Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de mémoire,
3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-93). For those who can read
Portuguese, José Murilo de Carvalho's A Formação
das Almas: O Imaginário da República no Brasil
(São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990) is a model
study on creating imaginary tradtions.

Many of these histories, like the one developed in this webpage,
focus on exposing the ideological content behind representations
of the past. By exposing this ideological content, one can better
understand how particularistic histories have acquired a popular
legitimacy. Equally important, however, are the aspects of history
imaginary traditions choose to repress or forget. The Amnesia
Button is designed to allow you to explore the topics that are
left out of the story that fashions Brazilian history in terms
of the French Revolution. The construction of historical amnesia
is not unique to Brazil. Readers can trace much of what has been
left out in the fashioned history of the French Revolution by
consulting the works by Hutton and Nora.

Merchants, artisans, and planters dominated the Inconfidência
Mineira of 1789. Influenced more by American than French
ideas, these rebels wanted to construct an independent Brazil
that would allow commerce and industry to thrive. Many rebels
depended upon slavery and had little interest in incorporating
Indians or African-Brazilians into their proposed new society, although
there were some exceptions.

Moreover, while Minas Gerais thrived at the end of the Eighteenth
Century, much of its new dynamism developed at the expense of
Bahia, the dominant state of northeastern Brazil, the earliest
center of Portuguese colonialism, and the core of African-Brazilian
culture at the time. Thus, at the end of the eighteenth century,
Bahia was experiencing economic decline, a situation which deteriorated
conditions for much of the free, but very poor, mulatto or mixed African-Portuguese or African-Indian population.
Consequently, Bahian rebels were drawn from a more popular class
of society than the Inconfidência Mineira. Most
of these rebels were free mulattos, who were soldiers, artisans,
and tailors. Indeed, so many tailors were arrested for rebellion
that the 1798 revolt has been called the ConjuraçãoAlfaiates or the "conspiracy of the tailors." Additionally,
as several historians, including E. Bradford Burns, have argued,
the Conjuração Alfaiates seems to have been
directly influenced by the French Revolution and, in many ways,
represented a far greater threat to the established socio-economic
and political system than the earlier rebellion in Minas Gerais.
As a mulatto soldier, Lucas Dantas do Amorim Tôrres, explained
to the judges who tried him for his role in the rebellion, "We
want a republic in order to breathe freely because we live subjugated
and because we're colored and we can't advance and if there was
a republic there would be equality for everyone." Other
rebels also indicated that they had been influenced by the French
Revolution and wanted independence, the creation of a republic,
equality, free trade, and the abolition of slavery. Posters demanded
equality and fraternity and the creation of black and brown citizen-soldiers.
Though the Bahian rebels were repressed almost as quickly as
those from Minas Gerais, their revolt showed that many ordinary
people shared in the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution and were determined to reshape society along more egalitarian
lines and without slavery. Yet ordinary Brazilian people, like
the Bahian rebels of 1798, rarely figure in the imaginary constructions
of Brazilian history.

Another rebellion broke out in Recife in Pernambuco in 1817.
Also in the Northeast, Pernambuco suffered from economic decline
until the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain
opened markets for Pernambuco cotton in Europe. But as the Portuguese
reestablished control after 1815, they once again began to impose
restrictions on Brazilian commerce. Tensions developed between
Brazilians and Portuguese in Pernambuco and gradually developed
into a full-scale movement to establish an independent republic
in the Brazilian Northeast. Rebels formed a provisional government,
then sought arms and diplomatic support from Argentina, Great
Britain, and the United States. Failing to get international
help, rebels sought support form Bahia and Ceará, but the
governors of the latter captaincies arrested them. Much more
limited in their demands than the Conjuração
Alfaiates, Pernambucan rebels abolished titles of nobility,
class privileges, and some taxes. Although rebels from Paraíba
and Alagoas joined those from Pernambuco, again the Royal government
quickly subdued the rebellion. The Pernambuco revolt did not
represent the same threat to the soical order as that of the tailors,
but it provided the largest opportunity for a Brazilian independence
that might have altered the social, economic, and, perhaps, political
structure of Brazil.

The events which transpired at Canudos, a small colony of religious fanatics in the interior of Bahia, or the sertão,
should have posed few difficulties for the new Brazilian republic.
The mystic, Antônio Conselheiro, who founded the colony
seemed to have few political interests, but rumors began to spread
that Conselheiro had organized a monarchical conspiracy designed
to overthrow the republic. Many in Canudos, however, seemed to resent much of the modernizing impetus of the Republic--its secularizaiton of marriage, its public health measures, and most of all, its taxes. When they refused to pay their taxes, and Conselheiro burned the tax roles showing how much they owed, Republican officials sent several
contingents from the police and the armed forces against the sertanejos,
but the soldiers were no match for the large numbers of men and
women gathered at Canudos. Fearful that the triumph of the Canudos
colonists was undermining the reputation of the Republic and the
army, the new President Prudente de Morais sent 10,000 men to
the city to annihilate it. Under fire for days, Canudos finally
surrendered on October 5, 1897.

Other millenarian movements broke out at this time, largely reflecting
the despair of the rural masses left out in the formation of the
new Republic. Another millenarian movement that seriously threatened
the government, more because of its existance than because of
any actual demands that emerged from it, developed in the Contestado,
another area in Brazil's vast backlands. Here, a monk named João
Maria gathered poor followers by promising them a better life
in the years between 1912 and 1915. Once again, the government
decided that they so threatened the fabric of Brazilian order
that it sent a huge army against them.

All of these millenarian movements broke out deep in Brazil's
hinterlands, where religious leaders were able to profit from
the widespread desire of many poor people for a better life coupled with a desire to maintain traditional community and religious values.
Though Brazilian historians have emphasized the peaceful evolution
of Brazilian society and have often praised the racial intermingling
of its vast multicultural society, the millenarian movements of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrate
that Brazilian history was far more complex than that suggested
in its imaginary history. The "affairs" of Canudos
and the Contestado reveal both the failure of the Brazilian government,
oriented toward the coast and the hinterlands of Rio de Janeiro,
São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, to pay much attention either
to the sertão or to the colored people who lived in
much of the country, who they really did not understand at all.
Foreshadowing the ominous role that the military would play in
Brazilian history, the government's determination to eradicate
those it did not understand made it difficult to develop any true
democracy in the country.

Indeed the existence of two Brazils as demonstrated in these millinarian
movements, provided the substance of Euclides da Cunha's great
Brazilian book, Os Sertões, translated into English as Rebellion in the Backlands. For da Cunha,
the "bedrock" of the Brazilian race could be found in
the mixed races of the backlands. Deeply threatened by the forces
of the cities along the coast, the sertanejos were the
only "true" Brazilians uncontaminated by foreign influences.
The theme is similar to the arguments that cast peasants as the
"true" Frenchmen in France at the same time. However,
da Cunha was very conflicted in his opinion, and while he
believed that the men and women of the sertão represented
the essence of what it meant to be Brazilian, he, nonetheless, was
attracted to the ideas of reformers oriented toward
modernizing Brazil both technologically and culturally, as well
as to those of Brazilian social Darwinists who believed that the
men and women of the interior represented signs of degeneration..

Euclides da Cunha's Rebellion from the Backlands reflected
a deep ambiguity about Brazil's multicultural/multiracial society,
and by the early Twentieth Century, many intellectuals began to
view Brazil's African heritage as a dangerous and polluting social
menace. As a consequence of this fear, many Brazilian Positivists
adopted a biomedical style based upon European ideas of social
Darwinism that not only taught that societies evolved through
competition to develop higher civilizations but that sick societies
could regress and degenerate. With the abolition of slavery in
1888, many intellectuals and politicians began to believe that
the struggle against degeneracy needed to be accelerated. With
the formation of the Republic, many intellectuals, scientists, and
engineers obtained a new role, which allowed them to implement
their plans to combat degeneracy in Brazil. The numbers of civil
engineers, hygienists, public health officials, coroners, and
criminologists expanded in the new Republic; they shared a single
goal: "progress, civilization, and modernity." Government
policy encouraged immigration to "whiten" Brazil, and
a talented engineer, Pereira Passos (1903-1906), launched a massive
urban renewal project designed to transform the central part of
Brazil's capital, Rio de Janeiro, into a Parisian-like, "civilized,"
capital city. The project involved the destruction of many old
communities where the poorest population lived. Moreover, Pereira Passos
along with Dr. Osvaldo Cruz also insisted on compulsory smallpox
vaccinations for everyone in 1904 to eliminate the disease and
pollution that threatened the city and its new elites.

But large numbers of men and women resented the destruction of
their neighborhoods, rejected the hygienists' arguments, and
viewed the compulsory vaccination as an unwarranted intrusion
of the government into private lives, an intrusion which threatened
the gender conventions that many men (and women) believed protected
the stability of the family. Collectively, these tensions produced
one of the most interesting rebellions in Brazilian history, the
"The Revolt Against the Vaccinations."

The urban renewal was as dramatic as that of Baron von Haussmann,
who widened Paris' streets during the Second Empire in an attempt
to make it "barricade-proof" or riot-proof. To some
extent Pereira Passos and Dr. Osvaldo Cruz were similarly motivated
in transforming Rio de Janeiro. They constructed a new port to
facilitate commerce, but much of the city was redesigned to drive
people and animals away from old communities. Streets were widened
and "sanitary brigades traveled around the whole city inspecting,
cleaning, disinfecting and ordering either the repair or demolition
of houses." But discontent escalated into revolt in 1904
with the attempt to eradicate smallpox in the city through a compulsory
program of vaccinations. Men and women took control of the city
for a week, challenging the government's authority. Prostitutes,
street vendors, and petty criminals took charge of the city's
streets.

Many ideas at odds with the new Republicans drove the rebels.
Many men and women resented the presence of strangers (doctors
or public health officials) in their households. Many men felt their honor challenged because these strangers were gazing at and touching the bodies of their wives and daughters when they were not present, so they no longer had control of their households. The fact that the government also determined whether or not a house was
"habitable" made it seem like it was unnecessarily intruding
into what had always been a family and private matter: the routine
of daily life in the domestic realm. With the destruction of their
neighborhoods, with the new taxes levied to pay for urban improvements,
and with the government intrusion into the deepest sanctites of the
home, many men and women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's most populous
and modern city, began to harbor monarchist sympathies.
They did not view the Republic as an opportunity for democracy
and influence in the political sphere, but rather as the tyranny
of scientists and doctors who made enormous claims on their private
lives.

Though their revolt was short-lived, the prostitutes, street-vendors,
and petty criminals of the streets of Rio de Janeiro joined many
ordinary men and women in exposing the limits of the new Republic.
Equality and democracy, supposedly the legacy of the French Revolution,
were not incorporated into either the ideology or the practical
political structure of the new Republic. Unlike in the French
Revolution, the idea of a revolution or a government in which
the "people" were sovereign was purely an abstract notion.

As events in Rio demonstrated, the government had nothing but
contempt for "the people," viewing them as a source
of disease and contagion that could maybe be controlled through
medicine but might involve driving them away from the space of
the elites. "The people," in turn, had no respect for
either their government or the scientists and engineers associated
with it. As the woman in the accompanying image explained to one
of Rio de Janeiro's agents of change, "The grocer told me
that the papers are talking about the vaccination program, which is a sham!"

Though popular opinion may have viewed urban renewal and social
hygiene as a sham, these movements as well as those in Canudos
and the Contestado demonstrate the gulf that separated ordinary
people--increasingly understood to be colored or of foreign birth--from the elites--who increasingly believed themselves to be and defined themselves as white, in spite of their genetic makeup. In rejecting the sertanejos and the American flag in the formation of the Republic, leaders rejected an American or indigenous heritage and linked themselves to a European past (albeit a French past) and to tradition, As they constructed their identity as something which was very different from those of the sertão and the streets of Rio de Janeiro, they began to identify themselves with everything that was French, the symbol of modern civilization. They redesigned Rio de Janeiro to resemble Paris, but it was a shallow and cheap copy of Paris without liberty, equality, fraternity, or the people, who were increasingly forced
to move into Brazil's famous shantytowns or favelas on
the city's dramatic hillsides.